Seven Year Lottery Win Finally Paid Out

The following tale is what dreams are made of, and it’s certainly the kind of thing that keeps me going when I pay out yet again for my weekly lottery ticket or play slots at the casino. In 2003, seven construction workers pooled together, as they did each week, to buy a lottery ticket. What they didn’t know at the time was that while their original lottery ticket didn’t win a cash prize, it did earn them another free ticket. That ticket went on to scoop a $12.5 million jackpot. The problem was that the men weren’t told that they had won a free ticket, nor that they had hit the big prize. Instead, the convenience store owner, it is alleged, saw this fantastic opportunity before his eyes and went to claim the prize as his own.

Over the years, the store owner, who eventually involved his grown kids in the scam, lived the life of luxury, buying top of the range cars, mansions and electronic toys. Last year, however, everything fell apart when the police swooped down on the family and arrested them for fraud. The Ontario Lottery and Gaming corp. knew that the store owner wasn’t the real winner, and set itself the mission of finding who it was. “We found the haystack, and we found the needle,” was how the chairman of the OLG described the mission and its subsequent success.

For an entire year, a specially created team, which developed its own technology to shift through endless information and data, searched for the true winner. Over 600 people came forward to claim the prize, but it was finally whittled down to a handful of real possibilities. Finally, the seven men who shared the lottery ticket were brought in to testify and they shared facts with the investigative team about the purchase that only they could have known. The OLG finally declared that the winners had been found and a check-handing-over ceremony was held last week. The total win had already grown to over $14.5 million thanks to interest earned over the years, and each of the men were awarded with a check worth over $2 million each.

Heartwarming or what??